AppFog

» see appfog.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

appfog showed up in my space around 2012 the way most paas platforms did. as a hacker news headline i bookmarked and never installed. it was the moment when “put your php app on a url and it scales for you” was a real promise that real startups were making.

the company started as php fog in june 2010, founded in portland by lucas carlson. one of the first paas products to focus on php specifically, at a moment when heroku still meant ruby and google app engine still meant python. it raised about eight million dollars across seed and series a, expanded language support to node and ruby and most of the rest, and rebranded to appfog in early 2011 to reflect the wider scope.

by late 2012 appfog claimed over a hundred thousand developer accounts. the free tier was generous, the deploys felt fast, and the UI was lighter than heroku's at a time when that mattered. that made it acquisition bait. centurylink announced the purchase on june 13 2013, folded the team into the savvis cloud division, and promised loudly that appfog was not going anywhere.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the breakout ~

php fog launched at portland startup weekend and got into y combinator's summer 2010 batch. the differentiation was simple. heroku was for ruby people, google app engine was for python people, and the entire wordpress and drupal world was on php with nowhere good to deploy. carlson's pitch was that php deserved the same one-command-deploy story that ruby had.

once the platform expanded beyond php, the rebrand to appfog made sense. the company also acquired nodester in august 2012 to pick up node.js expertise. for about eighteen months the platform sat in the second tier of paas behind heroku, ahead of dotcloud and orchestra.io, with serious enterprise interest building up.

~ what got buried with it ~

centurylink's promise that appfog was not going anywhere lasted exactly two years. in june 2015 the company announced appfog v1 would be retired. the final shutdown ran on 31 august 2016. customers were offered a path to centurylink's cloud foundry-based replacement, which most of them did not take. the platform's developer userbase, built on the original php fog and appfog community brand, scattered to heroku and to the early kubernetes wave.

~ the next chapter ~

the paas graveyard from this era runs deep. dotcloud pivoted to become docker and let the original product die. nodejitsu was bought by godaddy and shut not long after. appfog fits the pattern almost exactly. an independent paas with a real user base gets acquired by a larger infrastructure company, then sits inside that company without real investment until someone runs the math and decides the customers are not worth the platform team.

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